Only entropy comes easy. 

-Anton Chekhov

My wife and I invested a sun-up-to-sun-down weekend recently doing much needed yard work. After several trips to the home improvement store and some marathon weeding, mowing, landscaping, edging, planting, watering, and clean-up, we basked in the glow of domestic beauty and neighborhood approval.

I have two neighbors who are retired (you know these guys, they’re on your block too); one to the south of our home; one to the west. Their yards wouldn’t alienate the caddy for Tiger Woods; yard work is their vocation and avocation…So our yard is contextual—that is, in this unfair framing our yard often has the appearance of an abandoned repo.

We left for a two week trip and upon our arrival back home we encountered a dandelion orgy on our lawn. The once manicured yard had turned into something that resembled a vacant lot. As disheartening as this is we both anticipated it and weren’t surprised by what we found.

Entropy

Entropy is the second law of thermodynamics; which roughly states things in the universe go from order to disorder.

It’s speculated by scientist that entropy came into being the instant of the Big Bang—or the genesis of the universe. Heat, light, and all forms of energy have been spreading out moving energy to less concentrated points ever since.

Nature is constantly pushing in the direction of disorder; the evidence is ubiquitous from the age spots on the back of the hands of Hollywood’s once famous starlets, to the decaying ruins of ancient Greece, to your rusting SUV which is in the shop. As persistent as the crashing waves against the mighty bluffs which reclaim them to the ocean’s floor, entropy is a natural law which never sleeps.

Mitosis Takes Energy (Negative Entropy)

Aging is really a physiological example of entropy; each cell in the body undergoes more accumulative damage over time than it can repair. Like other entropic forces, aging is the breakdown of orderliness that is inherent in the physical universe. To experience negative entropy, or to slow aging, you must first input energy.

Mitosis is negative entropy in action; it’s the process of organized cell division that eventually becomes a complex organism such as a human or a butterfly. Only energy can cause negative entropy—that is, reverse entropy. And it is the central mystery of the universe. Some call this God, or “Organizing Intelligence” or a plethora of other names—that’s up to each individual; the point is that to bring order to disorder energy input is required.

But there is a built-in obsolesce to negative entropy:

Whenever matter and energy collect into orderly patterns, entropy is defied, but physics has always held that these “islands of negative entropy” are temporary, even though some of them—planets, stars, galaxies—endure a very long time. Eventually stars burnout, planets lose their orbital momentum, galaxies dissipate…Entropy is dragging the entire universe down to its end, when all energy will be eventually distributed across the vastness of space.
-Deepak Chopra (1993) Ageless Body, Timeless Mind: The Quantum Alternative to Growing Old

One of the simplest ways to stave off entropy (aging), if only temporarily, is to give the mind and the body something to do.
For example, taking trips (environmental complexity = dendrite growth in the brain) and doing yard work (exercise = change in biomarkers in favor of longevity).

Dynamic Non-change

Leaving for a trip while good for the brain, neglects the yard, which will require the energy input upon return. This resembles a creation and destruction cycle which Chopra calls “dynamic non-change.” Which means change takes place within a stable framework.

Our aging bodies are dependent on this state of dynamic non-change. We slow entropy in our yards like we do in our bodies, by intelligently infusing energy wherever disorder begins to take hold.

I’ve since mowed the lawn several times, watered the flowers, and pulled an occasional weed or two; but it has never regained the splendor of pre-trip proportions. The reason is obvious and has to do with the level of energy input. Like the finger in the dyke, we can stop the leak by a persistent expansion of energy and the will to do so—but negative entropy doesn’t come easy.

See

(photo sonoma.net)